Paper Victories.

When Things Turn Nasty: How does a commercial enterprise enforce a legal right against an ever-expanding body of human resistance, without the conflict escalating well beyond its original causes?

WILL THE MARINA at Kennedy Point (Pūtiki Bay) on Waiheke Island ever be completed? On paper, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!” The developer, Kennedy Point Boatharbour Ltd (KPBL) has ticked all the procedural and legal boxes right up to the Supreme Court. On paper, there is nothing to impede the construction of KPBL’s 126-berth marina.

On paper.

But this dispute, which in the week just passed flared into violent confrontation, is no longer taking place on paper. It is unfolding in the waters of Pūtiki Bay. On paper, Fletcher Building was authorised to build at Ihumatao. On the ground, the matter was not so clear-cut. If the images of burly construction workers flinging young Maori women into the sea, now viewable on Facebook and Twitter, bring a surge of supporters to the aid of the Ngāti Paoa protest movement, Protect Pūtiki, then KPBL will be faced with precisely the same dilemma as Fletcher Building. How does a commercial enterprise enforce a legal right against an ever-expanding body of human resistance, without the conflict escalating well beyond its original causes?

At both Ihumatao and Pūtiki Bay, the issues at stake are acutely political. Central to both is a series of increasingly controversial questions: Is the Law neutral? Is the Law colour-blind? Is the Law an instrument of colonial oppression? Is the Law, in any meaningful sense, compatible with the articles of the te Tirit o Waitangi?

In the eyes of tangata whenua, these are questions which the Law itself cannot resolve. How can the Law possibly judge its own legitimacy? Especially in a dispute where one side’s reliance of “the rule of law” is presented as a significant contributing factor to the conflict? A case of “Who guards the guardians?” and no mistake!

If this all sounds like an introduction to “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) the idéologie du jour, currently terrorising Republican Party-controlled legislatures all across the United States (and a number of political commentators here in New Zealand) then that is no accident. According to the University of California at Los Angeles’ Luskin School of Public Affairs, CRT “rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colour-blind, however, CRT challenges this legal ‘truth’ by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle of self-interest, power and privilege.”

The backstory to the Ihumatao stand-off certainly confirms this argument. The land in question was confiscated by the colonial government as it launched its armed invasion of the Waikato in 1863. It was taken from a sub-tribe deemed to be “in rebellion” for not swearing its allegiance to Queen Victoria with sufficient promptitude. That the land was then on-sold to Pakeha farmers certainly smacks of “self-interest, power and privilege”. The farmers’ claims to ownership of the land, while indisputably legal, would struggle to clear the hurdle of justice.

The dispute over who possesses Pūtiki Bay presents an even thornier set of questions. While the area remained in public hands, all the residents of Waiheke Island enjoyed equal access to its amenities, and the kororā (Little Blue Penguins) who nest in the adjoining breakwater stones came and went unmolested. It was only when the Auckland City Council effectively transferred the bay from public to private ownership that the trouble started. Critical race theorists would say that such a transfer was simply par for the course. City officials and regulators will always favour Pakeha business interests over those of the kaitiaki (indigenous guardians) of the “lands, forests, fisheries and other treasures” guaranteed to them under Article Two of te Tiriti o Waitangi. By CRT reckoning, the Law that made the alienation of Pūtiki Bay possible could never be either neutral, or colour-blind. Why? Because it was written by Pakeha, for Pakeha.

The stand-off at Pūtiki Bay, therefore, poses a much more dangerous question to the New Zealand state. It demands to know for how much longer the guarantees embodied in the articles of te Tiriti are expected to languish unheeded and unenforced, while Pakeha law continues to deprive Maori (and other New Zealanders) of what remains of their collective resources and treasures? There are no easy answers to this question because, ultimately, it is not a legal question at all. Ultimately, it is a political and constitutional problem.

It is no accident that the MP with responsibility for Waiheke Island, the Greens’ Chloe Swarbrick, is watching the stand-off at Pūtiki Bay with close attention. Ideologically sympathetic to the Maori campaign for radical constitutional change, she is also, as a committed environmentalist, acutely aware of how badly served Pakeha themselves continue to be at the hands of a legal system which seems irrevocably oriented towards power and privilege.

From all over New Zealand one hears the complaints of conservationists and local communities that the laws of the land are not being enforced by local and regional authorities. That, just as the rights of the indigenous people are overlooked and/or ignored, the rights of the poor, and the poorly-connected, are routinely brushed aside.

The explanation for this inconsistency has stood the test of time: “These decrees of yours are no different from spiders’ webs”, the Sixth Century BC Scythian prince, Anacharsis, is said to have remarked to the celebrated Athenian law-giver, Solon. “They’ll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they’ll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.”

What could yet emerge from the Pūtiki Bay protests is something very similar to the convergence that left the Police and the Government so helpless at Ihumatao. Not Maori alone confronting developers and their minions, but younger Pakeha New Zealanders standing alongside them in solidarity against a system that, time and again, has proved itself profoundly deaf to their urgings for a gentler, greener and fairer New Zealand.

Perhaps it is time for a thoroughgoing reassessment of exactly where New Zealand now stands. For how much longer, for example, does the New Zealand state expect to get away with operating a legal and administrative system borrowed holus bolus from the United Kingdom, and used with ruthless efficiency to make permanent the dominance of British settlers and their descendants over these islands? For how much longer does the business community and the agricultural sector expect their interests to be accorded priority? For how much longer are those excluded from the world of the comfortable and the secure expected to remain silent – and peaceful?

The answer, on paper, is what it always has been: forever. On paper, Kennedy Point Marina will be built and return a healthy profit to its investors. On paper, those Ngāti Paoa protesters will be arrested by the Police, and fined by the courts, for trespassing on their people’s ancestral land. On paper, all the avenues of legal redress for what is happening at Pūtiki Bay have been closed-off.

But, although history is written on paper, that is not where it is made. It is made in the world of flesh and blood and human passion, by the sort of people who, when thrown off a developer’s barge, into the water, and kicked in the head, climb right back on. And, by the people who, outraged by what they have witnessed, decide to stand with them.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 July 2021.

No Questions Please – We’re Revolutionaries!

The Kids Were All Right: By stripping away all moral and practical grounds for unified struggle, Critical Race Theory can only strengthen the elites’ grip on contemporary society. The abdication of School Strike For Climate Auckland offers a textbook example of this phenomenon. The moral force of the nation’s secondary students in the fight against climate change has been significantly compromised. And through it all the mainstream news media has had nothing to say.

PERHAPS THE MOST ASTONISHING aspect of School Strike For Climate Auckland’s (SSFCA) spectacular self-cancellation was the media’s lack of interest. Oh sure, they picked up the group’s news release, and made its contents known to the public, but that was it. There appeared to be a general reluctance, extending across the whole of the mainstream news media, to investigate the story in any depth. No attempt was made to flesh-out and explain what, to most New Zealanders, was a jarring and baffling item of news. The same media which had welcomed the School Strike For Climate Movement, and praised its achievements, accepted the curious demise of its largest section without serious investigation or comment.

The only explanation for such an egregious dereliction of journalistic duty is that mainstream editors and reporters were fearful of the territory into which any serious investigation of the event was bound to lead them. They would have to explain why a group of young and idealistic secondary-school students, people they had written glowing stories about, had somehow been persuaded that they, and their organisation, were racist. They would have been required to question whether the Maori and Pasifika groups into whose hands SSFCA had vouchsafed the climate fight were capable of maintaining the political momentum generated by Greta Thunberg’s global movement.

Most of all, they would have had to help ordinary New Zealanders understand the extraordinary self-abasement contained in the group’s news release:

We apologise for the hurt, burnout, and trauma. We also apologise for the further trauma caused by our slow action to take responsibility. We recognise that this apology can never be enough to make up for our actions on top of years of systemic and systematic oppression, racism, and the silencing of those who are the most affected by climate change. This apology is just one of our steps in taking accountability for our actions.

What could possibly have made these young people say such extraordinary things about themselves, and about the movement they had worked so hard to build?

Unwilling to go there, a more politically savvy mainstream news media would simply have ignored the news release. Certainly, if your intention is to let a story die, then the last place you should put it is on RNZ’s “Morning Report” or the NZ Herald’s website. That, however, is where the statement ended up – in all its woke glory. Tens-of-thousands of astonished New Zealanders heard it, or read it, and said: “What on Earth?” But, from the editors and reporters who had salved what remained of their journalistic consciences by broadcasting and publishing SSFCA’s words, no answers came – just enthusiastic endorsements of the organisation’s actions from indigenous activists.

Those astonished New Zealanders seeking an explanation for SSFCA’s actions need look no further than the American-born ideology known as “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). According to the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs:

CRT recognises that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalisation of people of colour. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colour-blind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle of self-interest, power and privilege.

Now, while you might need to be a professor to write the above definition of CRT, you most certainly do not need a PhD to grasp how CRT works in practice. In a nutshell, CRT operates according to the principle: “If you’re white, you cannot be right.”

Naturally, in the United States the historical force credited with creating white privilege and white supremacy is Slavery. In New Zealand, however, the place of Slavery has been taken by Colonisation. It is not to white slavers, but white settlers, that the followers of CRT look for the root of all Aotearoa’s evils.

Leftists who object that white workers will always have more in common with brown workers than they will with a white ruling-class that oppresses all workers, get no joy from the followers of CRT. White elites may derive material benefits from their dominant position, but working-class whites derive equally important psychological benefits from their position in the racial hierarchy. According to CRT, the existence of a whole category of human-beings deemed immutably inferior to the white race, makes it easier for white workers to accept their own socio-economic subordination. At a stroke, Marxism is reduced to just another prop for white supremacy!

By stripping away all moral and practical grounds for unified struggle, CRT can only strengthen the elites’ grip on contemporary society. The abdication of SSFCA offers a textbook example of this phenomenon. The moral force of the nation’s secondary students in the fight against climate change has been significantly compromised. Doubts and resentments will spread swiftly through the SSFC Movement, making it a pretty safe bet that the turnout for any future demonstrations will be only a fraction of its former efforts. If the oil companies had set out to sabotage the domestic movement against anthropogenic global warming they could hardly have done a better job than these local adherents of CRT.

Black American progressives have themselves noted the dangerous ironies inherent in CRT. As Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora note in their recent Guardian article “Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame Michel Foucault”:

Despite the ever-growing presence of this politics, its shortcomings are growing clear. “White guilt and black outrage,” as Cedric Johnson, professor of African American studies, has recently pointed out, “have limited political currency, and neither has ever been a sustainable basis for building the kind of popular and legislative majorities needed to actually contest entrenched power in any meaningful way” ….. In fact, he added, this “militant expression of racial liberalism” will “continue to defer the kind of public goods that might actually help” all those who are “routinely surveilled, harassed, arrested, convicted, incarcerated and condemned as failures”. With material stakes of politics growing ever more urgent many in the liberal centre would much prefer us to busy ourselves with loud rituals announcing our inner battles.

It would be unfair, however, to heap too much blame upon the young students at the heart of this story. One can only imagine the emotional intensity of the “struggle sessions” required to induce the activist core of SSFCA’s abject capitulation. During the infamous “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, the brutality of similar sessions, at the hands of Mao Zedong’s fanatical “Red Guards”, was sufficient to break Communist Party veterans of the “Long March”. What chance had an well-meaning, idealistic bunch of middle-class Auckland kids against such tactics?

We conclude, therefore, where we began. In its coverage of the SSFCA’s self-immolation, the mainstream news media touched upon none of the issues featured in this post. Why? Because, bluntly, any such investigation would be severely career-limiting for the young (or old) mainstream journalist who undertook it. This is unfortunate, because arising out of this story are a number of important questions.

Does it mean, for example, that in spite of being disadvantaged and under-resourced by colonisation, and only responsible for a small part of the local climate problem (which tends to be correlated with income, as well as population) Maori and Pasifika will also now bear the burden of solving the whole of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s climate change problem? Does it mean that Pakeha climate change activists will no longer accept historical responsibility for persuading the country’s farmers – overwhelmingly Pakeha for obvious colonial reasons – to do their bit to reduce biogenic methane and plant more trees? (Hat-tip to Dr Chris Harris.)

Don’t hold your breath for the answers. Like it or not, the precepts of CRT are now accepted as holy writ in the newsrooms of the nation. Guilty white journalists may cheer-on the Revolution as loudly as they wish, but they must not, under any circumstances, interrogate it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 June 2021.

Losing The "Struggle-Session" Over Climate Change.

Blaming And Shaming: A "property owner" is humiliated before the masses during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Critical Race Theory may substitute "White Privilege" for "Class Privilege", but the inescapability of the offending group's responsibility for "oppression" is exactly the same. The self-abasement of School Strike For Climate Auckland for its "racist" crimes against People of Colour is grimly reminiscent of Mao's Red Guards' "struggle sessions" against the enemies of the Revolution. 

THE GREAT WEAKNESS at the heart of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is its wilful ignorance of History and Anthropology. Its demonisation of “Whites”, along with the civilisations they created, owes more to religion than it does to science. A scientist would quietly explain to the adherents of CRT that the whole concept of race – especially when conflated with skin colour – is deeply flawed. That, genetically-speaking, the human species has always been one and indivisible. Culture may have elevated morphological differences into social, economic and political barriers, but such artificial barriers have always been the cause of racism – not the solution to it.

Just this week we have witnessed CRT in action in the “decision” of School Strike For Climate Auckland (SSFCA) to wind itself up. In spite of its obvious success in mobilising tens-of-thousands of mostly secondary-school students; and materially influencing the breadth and speed of the New Zealand Government’s response to the challenges of Anthropogenic Global Warming; SSFCA – “advised” by Maori and Pasifika groups also engaged in fighting Climate Change – declared themselves to be a racist organisation and handed over the entire cause to their slightly darker-skinned comrades.

The statement released by SSFCA was heart-breaking. To find an historical precedent for the document’s abject self-negation and unqualified acknowledgement of guilt it is necessary to go back to the “struggle sessions” of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s. Or, even further back, to the “confessions” tremulously delivered by the broken victims of Joseph Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The shaming and vilification required to reduce these idealistic young people to a state of such utter intellectual prostration proves conclusively that human viciousness is not a trait peculiar to those whose skins are white.

The fate of the School Strike For Climate Movement in New Zealand must now be considered tenuous – at best. Across the country, activists will be struggling to come to terms with SSFCA’s decision. What should they do? Continue mobilising their generation against the greatest existential threat of our age? Do their best to fight off the CRT-based attacks on their alleged “white privilege” and racism? Or, should they, too, hand over the cause to Maori and Pasifika?

The temptation to adopt the latter course will be very strong. Although the School Strike For Climate Movement can put thousands of young people on the street, it is important to bear in mind that the organisational cores of such movements are actually quite small. Certainly, they are small enough to be intimidated and overwhelmed by CRT extremists ready, willing and able to wear them down in struggle-sessions of ever-increasing emotional intensity. If hardened Chinese Communists, veterans of Mao’s Long March, could be broken by such methods, it’s difficult to see Kiwi secondary-school kids resisting such unrelenting ideological pressures for very long.

The natural human response to such tactics is to say “F**k it!” and simply walk away. Sadly, it won’t just be the activists doing the walking. What’s the bet that a substantial number of those who formerly responded to the SSFC Movement’s calls will walk away with them? Word will spread about what happened in Auckland (and, other places) and a bright, sharp, sliver of iron will enter these young New Zealanders’ souls. They will struggle to resist the temptation to make a racist response, and yet, from somewhere deep inside them, the angry cry will rise: “Bastards!”

“You see?”, the CRT extremists will then respond. “We were right all along. The whole SSFC Movement is deeply and irretrievably racist.”

Not that CRT allows “White People” to be anything else. In essence, CRT is a Manichean system of thought. At its heart, an uncompromising struggle between Good and Evil; where Black, indigenous, people of colour – the righteous – are pitted against the incurably wicked White Supremacists. No room in CRT for the notion that what unites the human species is vastly more important than what divides it. Were Dr Martin Luther King still with us to share his dream that: “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”, the CRT extremists would shout him down.

To defeat global warming, humanity must be united. The zealotry of the Critical Race Theorists is making that much more difficult.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 June 2021.